Aug 4, 2011

Excerpts from the book: Into the Cannibal’s Pot, by Ilana Mercer (Part 2)

TAKE NOTE: The following extracts were sourced from the Smashwords edition, where approximately 20 percent of the content can be viewed for free. Because Smashwords does not deliver the content in print form, but in various digital formats – the extracts I’ve published here will thus not reference any page numbers. Reference numbers used to indicate the author’s sources, have also been omitted. Click here if you missed Part 1

When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist- friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West.

Indeed, world leaders and the liberal lickspittle media seldom speak of the embarrassment that is the democratic South Africa - the crumbling infrastructure of this once First World country, and the out-of-control crime - down to an ongoing mini-genocide. Rocker Bono certainly isn’t moved to tears over the seemingly systematic extermination of the Afrikaner farmers of South Africa. The cultural cognoscenti in the US are equally silent about the New South Africa’s unparalleled, radical, race-based wealth- distribution policies.

As Into The Cannibal’s Pot demonstrates, South Africa’s democratically elected African leaders are as committed as their political predecessors, apartheid-era Afrikaners, to restructuring society around race. With one distinction: more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.* Consequently, the much-maligned Western stronghold established in South Africa under Boer - and before that British-rule is rapidly reverting to type. Gone is the European strongman who suppressed the seething African kraal. What has arisen instead is best captured by Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.” Dubbed the “Rainbow Nation,” for its multiculturalism, South Africa is now, more than before, a “Rambo Nation.”

Americans, who take for granted their domestic tranquillity, can’t afford to finesse the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa. Into The Cannibal’s Pot compels them to stare into “The Heart of Darkness” that is the New South Africa, and by so doing, offers a cautionary tale: in their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that traditionally Western legal institutions, however flawed, are preferable to institutions riven by tribal feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties.

Universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom.

As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored. A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote?

Post-apartheid South Africa serves as a reminder that such societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes; the new South Africa reminds us that, for better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. Sadly, the facts as this writer tells them indicate that, while the Old South Africa could only have improved; the New South Africa can but decline.

So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture? Simply this: Although grisly horror stories have percolated into the popular press, the emetic facts about the New South Africa have never before been told. They must be! Into the Cannibal’s Pot fills this knowledge gap. This book, moreover, is crucial in curbing the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure.

In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer. American institutions no longer assimilate immigrants.

Rather, they acculturate them to militant identity politics aimed at doing away with merit. Dissolving the American people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, will likely erode American institutions further, and may well replicate on American soil the terrifying conflicts that mar the Third World. Ever the source of deafening demagoguery about the virtues of democracy, American leaders might wish to consider that, “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule.”

Still, American leaders refused to rest until South Africa became a democracy. And before that Zimbabwe. And after that Iraq. (They were not alone. I trace that chain of culpability in Chapter Seven, “The Anglo-American-Australian Axis of Evil.”) The consequences in each case have been catastrophic. While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike to peacefully pursue the same. This maxim applies both to Mesopotamia and to Azania (the term once used for South Africa by the governing African National Congress). The time is historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of liberal democratic ideology through the prism of another democratic disaster: post-Apartheid South Africa.

If the sanctity of life is the highest value in a civilized society, then the New South Africa has little to recommend it. Societies are only as good as the individuals of whom they are comprised; individuals only as good as their actions. Democratic South Africa is now preponderantly overrun by elements, both within and without government, which make a safe and thriving civil society impossible to sustain. The salient feature of mass politics in the New South Africa is a government unable to control itself and unwilling to control a sinecured criminal class. As a consequence, sundered is the individual’s right to live unmolested.

Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts. The realities of crime-riddled democratic South Africa are relayed in Chapter One: “Crime, the Beloved Country.” The title parodies Alan Paton’s poignant tale titled Cry, the Beloved Country. The story of the life of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo was to apartheid South Africa what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to antebellum America.

Victims of crime in South Africa garner some sympathy, but it is sympathy on a sliding scale. Thus, worldwide, the press extended liberal pieties to liberal Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer. She had survived an attack in her Johannesburg home. The Prince of Wales bewailed the murder of another prominent liberal, Anglo-Zulu War historian David Rattray. He was killed by six armed Zulus. When the nephew of South Africa’s finest novelist (no; it’s not J. M. Coetzee), the liberal André Brink, was shot and killed in front of his wife and daughter, The Economist took note:

‘First he thought it was a mouse, then a rat—and then the rat shot him in the face.’ That is how André Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at 3am in the morning.

Former First Lady Marike de Klerk, brutally stabbed in her Cape Town apartment, received a fair amount of international attention too. Not so the Afrikaner farmers who are being culled like springbok in a hunting safari. This brings us to the mini-genocide underway in the democratic South Africa, chronicled in Chapter Two, “The Kulaks of South Africa Vs. The Xhosa Nostra.”

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is largely composed of the Xhosa Bantu tribe. The Xhosa are also well- represented among the Africans armed with automatic weapons, who roam the countryside killing Afrikaner farmers. These rural folk - who, by law, must battle their ubiquitous assailants with only a shotgun, a handgun and a legally limited number of rounds at their disposal - are convinced that the assaults are state- sanctioned, the ANC’s idea of an early eviction notice; “land reform,” if you will. The evidence suggests that they may have a point, hence the title pitting the “Kulaks” against the “Xhosa Nostra.”

But before we recount how upward of 3,000 members of this once 40,000-strong community - almost ten percent - have hitherto been exterminated, we explain who the Boers are and provide a brief, action-packed, history of Boer, Briton and Bantu. Americans will want to hear this! Decades of emasculation - legal and cultural - have created a hunger among American men, especially, for heroic, historic narrative. The story of the South African settlers, circa 1652, is every bit as epic as that of the American settlers. Despite their comparable foibles and frailties, the last haven’t been blackened by historians as much as the first.

It is commonly argued, in defiance of emerging facts to the contrary,4 that crime is an equal opportunity offender in South Africa: whites, blacks and browns are all in it together. What is incontrovertible, however, is that, where economic opportunities are concerned, the minority that dare not speak its name is on the wane. White males, strictly speaking, are not supposed to comprise more than ten percent of the payroll in a South African company. As during apartheid, a class of people is being dispossessed because of their pallor.

Chapter Three, “Dispossession is Nine-Tenths of the Law,” explores this legal attack on property known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). BEE is yet another unique feature of the South African democracy, whereby racist labor laws have made for what Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist, has charitably termed “The world’s most extreme affirmative action program.” The upshot of such a coercive transfer of private wealth from those who create it to those who consume it is that societal institutions - state and civil - are being hollowed out like husks. South Africa’s gutted institutions serve as a harbinger of things to come in the U.S., where affirmative action is still dismissed as a “minor irritant,” but ought not to be.

South Africa is a microcosm of what America could become, unless it returns to the principles that made it great. If American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming them from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become harder and harder. Sadly, it is probably already too late for South Africa, where the majority opposes a meritocracy. Americans, however, must once again embrace merit and individualism. Be it in the U.S. or in South Africa, preferential treatment, enforced by legal fiat and rooted in the characteristics of a group (race) rather than the value of the individual, flouts justice in every respect.

The West has grown accustomed to Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s refined former president. Having spent most of his adult life abroad in exile, Mbeki has the mannerisms of an English gent, not a man of the people. But the baton has been passed from the pukka proper Mbeki to the populist polygamist Jacob Zuma, whose favorite jingle is called “Bring Me My Machine Gun.” (It only has two lines; the second beseeches, rather politely, “Please bring me my machine gun.”) In a country in which crimes are seldom prosecuted, the newly-installed President Zuma has the dubious distinction of having stood trial on 783 charges of corruption, racketeering, tax evasion, and rape.

Against Mbeki’s reserved style, there is Zuma’s unbuttoned conduct, dancing half naked in tribal dress. In one of his Noble- Savage moments, after forcing sex on an HIV-positive acquaintance, Zuma promised, disarmingly, that he took a shower as a prophylactic against AIDS. It has been suggested that Zuma has done for South Africa’s international image what Borat Sagdiyev has done for Kazakhstan. With one distinction: Borat is a fictitious character, the product of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic genius; Zuma is “for real.”

Since Zuma’s ascension, wealth transfer in South Africa is expected to accelerate considerably and to resemble ever more closely the unabashed confiscation and dispossession brought about by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. “Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” or Chapter Four, analyzes the significance of the unqualified support Zuma’s predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, have lent the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over the decades. “If you want to see the future of South Africa, it might not be a bad idea to look at the present in Zimbabwe.”

The Old South Africa had been governed by Puritans. But as Christianity receded in influence after the 1994 transition, the void left has been filled by Islam. The unintended consequences of bringing the Old South Africa to its political knees, to the detriment of American interests, are covered in Chapter Six, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”

America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However, even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn’t, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed “The White Tribe of Africa.” They are as African as black South Africans. What is to be done, then, in light of the fact that Afrikaner farmers, in particular, are being killed off at alarmingly high rates? While it remains for the secessionists to “give territorial content” to their aspirations, secession is one of the escape routes suggested in the conclusion, “Saving South Africans S.O.S.”

Into the Cannibal’s Pot is topped and tailed with hard evidence that allows conclusions vis-à-vis the aggregate characteristics of South African society. Although not necessarily politically correct, such conclusions are perfectly proper. With this in mind, a word about the titular tease. Cannibalism, attests Leonard Thompson, author of The Oxford History of South Africa, was widespread during the upheaval associated with rise of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s.13 These days, in northeastern Congo, two prominent militias, the Lendu and the Hema, delight in demonstrating to UN observers their culinary creativity with human hearts and livers.

While cannibalism—motivated by aggression, ancestral reverence, or survival—has seldom been anathema in Africa, Into the Cannibal’s Pot is meant as a metaphor, and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery:

In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. … The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal’s pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it’s not inherent in being religious.

Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian thinker, and a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans. These, and other causes - and excuses - are examined in Chapter Five, “The Root-Causes Racket.”

Based on the evidence presented in this book, both Ms. Rand and Mr. Etounga-Manguella would have agreed that South Africans had been tossed into the metaphorical cannibal’s pot. Washington and Westminster insisted that the country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed. Ironically, America’s founding fathers had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic. Yet under the wing of the American eagle a dispensation was negotiated in this writer’s former homeland, the consequence of which is the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.

Since Into the Cannibal’s Pot stands for peaceful, progressive, and sustainable change, it will resonate with those who saw the folly of imposing majority rule on Iraq. Democratizing Mesopotamia has resulted in horrifying material destruction and lasting moral damage. Democratizing Azania has, similarly, made it abundantly clear that the franchise is not to be equated with freedom and that political rights do not safeguards natural rights. The cause and the consequence of the almost over-night, top- down transformation of South Africa is a society where might makes right.

In the interstices of this polemic, the reader will find my story and the story of those I love and had to leave behind. Above all, this tome is a labor of love to my homelands, old and new.